Circles!

I'm excited about painting in a new format, and with water paintings, what works better than round, porthole sized (if you are on the Titanic), circles? Shown below, there are four. The top one is the print of the photograph. The second is the panel I paint on, with a warm burnt sienna undertone. Then there is the panel sized, black and white print out. The back is covered in charcoal, then I place the print out over the panel and trace the dominant shapes, here by value of lights and darks.


Finally, there is my computer, which I set up somewhere else, but keep in view because my printer likes to add in phantom colors and turn the greens black. (Note: I sometimes split the screen to sort of watch but mainly listen to TV, lately the wonderful webisodes of Dr. Horibble's Sing-A-Long Blog and The Guild on repeat. If you like awkward comedy and smarmy superheros, check them both out! PS. Thanks Charlie!)


Here is the panel, with the faint lines from the tracing just barely visible. The wavy lines are, well, the waves, while the vertical lines are hashing to separate the dark spaces from the lighter ones. A majority of the shapes are really created while painting, but once again using available technology, this is a quick way to hammer out the perspective inherent in the size of shapes to get the level of detail I seek.


Finally, here is the first layer completed over two long studio sessions. And thanks to my less than ideal old iPhone camera, it looks pretty good! But in reality it sucks hard, and will need another complete layer of paint followed by a glaze to smooth out the transitions and build in detail. But not a bad start...

- jb boyd